This post is part of my Anarchist Bible series - see the introduction and list of posts.

Who is the greatest ruler in scripture? The example that kings should follow and hero that nations should hope for? And what was the best era for Israel in God’s eyes?

Many come through a lifetime of Sunday School and would answer this by pointing to David and Solomon, and the construction of the glorious temple in Jerusalem alongside the magnificent royal palace at the center of Israel’s greatest geographic and economic expansion.

Probably unsurprising at this point - we’re going to look at that a bit closer.

First, let’s turn back the clock to the days of the prophet Samuel. Israel is a loose confederation of tribes and clans, decentralized, often occupied, with no monarchy of inherited rule, no great army, no taxation, no bureaucracy, and no capital city. They have no king but God alone, and God works through particular individuals as (very imperfect) agents to guide Israel in particular moments.

Israel sees the nations around them, great empires of the Egyptians and Hittites, practicing centralization and dominating large areas under the rule of famous kings. They've experienced occupation at the hands of varied neighbors mighty in military force. They have experienced the oppressive weight of others’ militarization and monarchy on their backs for decades, and they come to Samuel with a demand, recounted in 1 Samuel 8.

“Appoint us a king to judge us like all the other nations have!” They want to fight fire with fire, to defend themselves from kings and armies with a strong monarchy of their own. Samuel and God both feel wounded. Samuel feels it as a rejection of his own leadership. God tells Samuel it's not really a slight against Samuel at heart, but expresses that this turn toward centralization, a monarchy, a state, etc. is a negative thing, a rejection of the sufficiency divine rule with no masters but God. An anarchist would have a similar negative reaction - seeing the state of things before this shift as far closer to anarchic ideal than a centralized monarchic state that would raise taxes, armies, and bureaucracy.

Let’s be very clear. God does not celebrate the turn to monarchy. Rather, God is portrayed as reluctantly telling Samuel to give the people what they want. God does not view the turn to monarchy as a good thing or part of a greater divine plan. Rather, God so highly values human freedom and rejects coercion that God allows Israel to make this terrible choice.

However, God, full of anarchic proclivity, tells Samuel to warn Israel of all of the negative effects of a monarchy.

Samuel's warning mentions royal decrees drafting sons into military and economic service, confiscation of land and resources to support bureaucratic underlings, taxation, and overall oppression that turns the people into royal slaves crying out for rescue as they did under Pharaoh.

God’s word here is a condemnation of the essential functions of a centralized state with the right to tax, draft, and coerce.

As God rescues Israel out of Pharaoh’s slavery in Egypt, the villain they are rescued from is the premiere centralized monarchy of the region and era, full of drafts, forced labor, and taxation to support military and building projects and the institution of the monarchy and its servants. In contrast, God leads Israel on a nomadic journey as a decentralized set of tribes, without magnificent constructed temples that would drain resources and require central authority and forced labor. Instead, God's sacred meeting place was a mobile tent, a “tabernacle” that could disassemble and move with this decentralized pilgrim people wherever they went. God’s dwelling place communicated the divine character of humility, proximity, flexibility, simplicity, and a rejection of coercion, o ftreating a certain place as more uniquely sacred than another, and of allowing the divine relationship to be instrumentalized by any city or ruler as a moneymaking attraction, symbol of divine mandate, or tool of political power.

As the history of Israel progresses, tales are told of their various kings, and many are remembered as “bad kings”, exemplifying what Samuel warned about, by readers with a passing familiarity of the history. However, David and Solomon are generally remembered by readers as good kings, a model of and justification for the righteousness of the monarchy.

However, I’d argue David and Solomon exemplify exactly what Samuel warns about and follow in the footsteps of Pharaoh from whom God rescued Israel in the first place.

From the very beginning, the struggle for the crown between David and his predecessor Saul results in conflict and death across the land, from the massacre of the whole town of priests at Nob, to the civil war recounted in 2 Samuel 2-4.

Once David’s rule is fully established, 2 Samuel 5 tells of the beginning of the Davidic dynasty solidifying power at a central location and building up urban Jerusalem. Immediately the story records David building a city and a palace and marrying many wives, luxuriating in the power of absolute rule. The ark of God's presence is brought to Jerusalem and king and religion are symbolically united in a centralized location, like Pharaoh with his own empire’s powerful priests and temples. David wants to build a grand and stationary temple for the ark of God's presence that would stand alongside his own palace, but God rejects the plan, reminding David through the prophet nation that this is not something God has asked for, but that God has been content in a mobile dwelling among the people.

David fights many wars and expands Israel's territory. The text makes positive comments about his establishment of justice, but we can see the conscription and death such campaigns would surely hiscause. David's comfort, wealth, selfishness, and willingness to use his power to coerce others against their will and limit their freedom is highlighted in his actions to take Bathsheba as his mistress and then wife, having her husband killed on the front lines.

The battle for inheritance creates more violence and death in the next generation as David's sons jockey for power and many lives are lost as common soldiers are drawn into the fight. Women like Tamar and Abishag become playthings in the battle for power, subjected to abuse, and rebellions like Sheba’s break out amidst the chaos in protest of the monarchy.

The book of 2 Samuel ends strangely on an account of a census taken by David, which is presented as a sinful mistake. The text doesn’t clearly state the problem with the census, but we can interpret it fairly reliably. Censuses historically facilitated two primary things - taxes and conscription. They are one of the most distinctive elements of the centralized state, and the text clearly takes issue with it at the climactic conclusion of the book. There is a skepticism and potentially even a condemnation here of David's work of building a centralized and coercive monarchy, even while the text seeks to proclaim David's accomplishments in other places.

The book of 1 Kings begins with Solomon winning the battle among David’s sons, with his brothers and their allies getting killed along the way.

Most of the first half of 1 Kings is devoted to telling of Solomon’s wealth and construction projects. He demands significant tribute from the people of Israel and surrounding vassal regions, amasses wealth to rival the greatest empires of the time, takes hundreds of wives, conscripts forced labor to complete massive projects including multiple palaces and the temple in Jerusalem, and centralizes power even further in the city of Jerusalem as the dominant location within Israel, seat of both monarchy and religious authority. In a move that sounds remarkably like the Pharaoh from whom God rescued Israel, Chapter 9 particularly tells of Solomon's coerced labor by numerous foreigners to complete all of the construction projects, and chapter 10 tells of his wealth exceeding all others, including the types of accumulated wealth listed out in Samuel’s warning about the monarchy being a bad idea. The author/compiling editor, very likely the same one for the books of Samuel and Kings, is seeking to make the connection explicit between Samuel’s warning and Solomon’s rule.

After Solomon's death, the nation again falls into civil war over the throne, and in 1 Kings 12 a key named cause of the rebellion against the Davidic dynasty is the heavy financial and labor burden imposed by Solomon and his son Rehoboam upon the people. The text declares that the consequences of the loss of most of the kingdom come upon the dynasty as an act of God. The people cry out for relief already in the third generation of the monarchy for which they begged.

Many others centralize power, draft armies, force labor, tax heavily, and construct grand buildings in the rest of the history of the kings of Israel and Judah, and prophets are repeatedly sent by God to condemn them for it. David and Solomon, however, are the models and pinnacle of that behavior, the very thing Samuel warned would happen if the people named a king.

Samuel warns of a king taking the children of Israel to build his chariots, fight his wars, work for his profits, and he warns of the king consolidating wealth at the expense of the people, resulting in their crying out for relief. David and, to a much greater extent, Solomon are portrayed by these books as doing exactly what Samuel warns about and causing the people to ask for relief.

Monarchy, wealth, and institutionalized religion weave themselves together in Israel’s history, beginning with David, Solomon, and their temple. Again and again God sends prophets to condemn this wicked system, and even allows the elites of Israel to experience exile as a consequence for this activity.

However, the system the Davidic dynasty built - centralized economic and military power in Jerusalem intertwined with religious authority and a temple bureaucracy - was so entrenched that it survived and cooperated with imperial occupations and in some form carried all the way through to the time of Jesus. There it served as the structural framework through which wealth was ever more centralized with deep involvement from temple functionaries complicit with imperial rulers and enriching themselves along the way while everyday Jews were driven off of their land and made poor tenants, wage laborers, and beggars.

This was not what God wanted. From Samuel's warning, through Nathan's confrontation of David, Elijah's confrontation of Ahab, and numerous other prophetic voices, through John the Baptist and Jesus himself, God condemns this system. The monarchy was not God's plan but a twisted subversion of it which God consistently challenges. Yes, Jesus is seen as descendant and heir of David, but one that is bringing Jubilee that is a subversive revolution against every element of what David and Solomon put in motion and every expectation of what God’s rule would look like. God’s rule would not look like the nationalist monarchy of Solomon, but the grassroots movement of self-sacrifice, mutual aid, non-coercion, and consensus-based decisionmaking that was demonstrated in Jesus’ life and followers.

Further, as we look at Jesus, we do not see him take up the mission of restoring the monarchy of Israel or building a new temple on earth. Rather, he emphasizes a decentralized movement, calling all of his followers the “temple of the Holy Spirit”. It is in the distributed grassroots community of mutual care that God dwells, not in a grand construction made on the backs of forced labor to shore up support for a wealthy ruler.

What, then, do we make of the story of God granting Solomon wisdom near the beginning of 1 Kings’ tale of his reign?

The Books of 1 and 2 Chronicles tell much of the same history as recounted above but clean it up quite a bit and make David and Solomon look better than in the books of Samuel and Kings. Even in Chronicles though, it is clear the people resented the heavy burdens of Solomon and rebelled against the dynasty because of it, and that God disapproved of the growing centralization, shown in key moments like God’s condemnation of the census. Chronicles’ account, in comparison to Samuel/Kings’ account of the same events, also shows the reality that different biblical authors have different perspectives, agendas, and contexts, which is important to how we read and interpret scripture.

It seems to me there are a few elements that should be kept in mind coming to the text in both books about Solomon's dream. These texts seem to be internally conflicted about David and Solomon. Some places seem to glorify and praise them and their actions, while others (particularly in Samuel/Kings’ version) seem to be clearly making connections between their actions and the warning of Samuel, taking issue with their activity. To me, it seems like there are likely multiple sources or editors involved with the development of the texts to their present forms, which would contribute to differences in perspective showing up within and among the texts, but that is far more academic a conversation than there is space to explore here. Suffice it to say that some sources may see these rulers as wise and glorious while others may have more concern about their negative impacts.

The dream also would rely on Solomon’s own self-reporting to be included in the text, or a divinely-provided miraculous knowledge of the event. Both of those present complications for interpretation, including that the text goes on to justify all of Solomon’s wealth as mandated by God, which would be on the basis of either Solomon's self-reporting (self-serving) or God revealing those monarchy-serving details to an inspired author. What I think is more likely is that this story is crafted by the author of this portion of the text as part of a narrative of Solomon’s great rule, in an effort to contrast that with later kings and with the situation of exile in Babylon at the likely time of composition or at least compilation of the text.

Books of scripture have contexts in which they were written, purposes for their reception by their own historical audiences, and agendas they are trying to accomplish. Even within that, however, they do give insight into God’s history with the people of God, historical realities like the wealth and centralization of the Davidic monarchy, and God's response to those realities. Through the primary lens of Jesus and even within the witness of the text itself, it becomes clear that God does not simply give divine blessing to the monarchy as the will and plan of God. God critiques it from before it begins, challenges its “heroes”, and steps into the story in human flesh centuries later to subvert the methods and fruits of the monarchy in Jerusalem.

We can see carrying on to our own day the dangers of centralized power. Massive state institutions uphold inequality by threat of force, rulers drain away resources into their own pockets and send near-children off to wars serving only their own interests. Powerful states and rulers today continue the same consequences Samuel warned about thousands of years later. Jesus, as a subversively different model of leader, rather than his ancestors of the Davidic monarchy, offers the true example for us to aspire to and construct society around, and the basis for critique of states and rulers in our own day.

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